Re: Data shows Top 50 Software Vendors not using Ada

[agate!howland.reston.ans.net!darwin.sura.net!uvaarpa!murdoch!holmes.acc.V irginia.EDU!dtl8v@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Douglass T. Lamb)]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Jun14140053@world.std.com>, srctran@world.std.com (Gregor
y Aharonian) writes:
|> 
|>    What has killed any chances of Ada surviving outside the Mandated world
|> is the rampant hypocrisy inside the Mandated world with regards to Ada,
|> hypocrisy that festers because of the silent of professinaly reputable
|> public servants.
|> 
|>  Greg Aharonian

  Having read your many posts to this newsgroup, Mr. Aharonian--and not to
start any more flame wars, which lend little to the technical discussion of
this group--I suspect you have ignored the wide usage of Ada in the non-U.S.
computing community.  You may be in the majority in the U.S. as a proponent
of C/C++, but in Europe, for instance, Ada is far more widely used than C,
and they have developed what are probably the most sophisticated software
validation and safety procedures in the world.  Ada does include many extra
features that encourage modern software engineering principles, which is not
to say that they cannot be implemented in C/C++, just that the ANSI/ISO C and
C++ standards contain nothing of the sort, leaving such additional libraries
or preprocessors to the individual compiler vendors and thus impeding
portability.  I realize you have lambasted Ada's supposed portability as well,
and I will not dispute with you the problems inherent in porting any software
code between machines.  I believe some of the edge the U.S. has lost in the
software quality race has been caused by our refusal to keep up with standards,
whether Ada or C++.  Europe uses Ada, and Japan uses Prolog (in some part),
but the U.S. uses ???.  Granted, C/C++ has obtained the largest share of the
market, simply because a C compiler is included with every Unix machine, and
Unix, while certainly not the best operating system in existence, is used
because it is familiar, because it's been around for so many years.  However,
the following languages also have large shares of the U.S. market: Ada, COBOL,
Lisp, FORTRAN, and assembly in all its manifestations (used even where a
higher-level language would have made the project easier and more
maintainable).

  The Ada mandate and documentation standards were intended to make code
for DoD projects relatively uniform, even though several exceptions
might be granted for the use of other languages.  This way, another
contracter can pick up the project where the first one left off, for updates
or maintenance.  Though certainly Ada is NOT the only language used today
in the DoD, it HAS achieved a degree of homogeneity impossible without a
mandate, and the so-called polylingual problem the DoD faces has been lessened,
not increased.  Ada may not be the best language for EVERY project, but
neither is C/C++ or Lisp or FORTRAN, but Ada was designed to support most of
the programming applicable to the DoD, and as such, it is better to side with
homogeneity and the resulting increased maintainability by writing all
general-purpose applications that do NOT demand exceptions in Ada.  That they
did not side with a C++ mandate is quite understandable, especially given
that all Ada proposals were derivative of Pascal and NOT C.  Language-
enforced readability is a lot more effective than programmer-specific
readability.

-- 
Doug lamb@Virginia.EDU             U.Va. Dept. of Electrical Engineering
All uncited opinions herein, express or implied, reflect the position of
          no other organization or individual than myself.